Author Archives: Jack Lyon

Setting Up Book Pages

By Jack Lyon | Published: February 25, 2004

Two weeks ago, I explained how to calculate page margins when typesetting a book in Microsoft Word. I neglected, however, to explain how to set up the pages themselves. So here goes. For most books, you’ll need three different page layouts: 1. The first page of a chapter. 2. A left (verso) page. 3. A […]

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Size and Zoom

By Jack Lyon | Published: February 11, 2004

I recently noticed that one of my colleagues, a fellow editor, was reading a document set in 10-point type, with the lines running all the way across his giant 21-inch monitor. He was having a terrible time “tracking” from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and he was squinting, bending […]

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Calculating Page Margins

By Jack Lyon | Published: February 4, 2004

In past newsletters, I’ve sometimes discussed aspects of typesetting in Microsoft Word: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708754845 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708956278 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711888513 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711932079 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1712050217 One item I haven’t addressed is how to calculate page margins *for publication,* which is not the same as just clicking File > Page Setup and putting in some numbers. If you needed to set up page margins […]

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Comments to Text

By Jack Lyon | Published: January 28, 2004

I’ve been asked by several readers if there’s a way to convert Word comments (Insert > Comment) to document text. It depends on what “convert” means. If you just need to get the text of a bunch of comments, you can open the Comments pane (View > Comments), select all, copy, and then paste to […]

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Autotext Toolbar

By Jack Lyon | Published: January 21, 2004

Microsoft Word’s AutoText feature provides an easy way to store and then reuse text, graphics, fields, tables, bookmarks, and other items. For example, this newsletter includes the same “Fine Print” section every week. All I have to do is save that text as an AutoText entry, and I can easily insert it in the newsletter […]

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Notes to Bibliography

By Jack Lyon | Published: January 14, 2004

I’m often faced with the task of creating a bibliography for a book I’m editing, but I hate typing in all those entries from scratch. Lazy fellow that I am, I’ve figured out an automated way to turn parenthetical notes into bibliography entries. It’s longish, but it sure beats doing it by hand. You may […]

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Editing Notes and Text Side by Side

By Jack Lyon | Published: January 7, 2004

Many of the books I edit in Word are loaded with footnotes, and I’ve often wished I had a way to see notes and text at the same time while scrolling through them independently. Comes the dawn! It’s easy: 1. Open your footnote-laden document. 2. Make sure you’re looking at the document in Normal view […]

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Microsoft's Font Properties Extension

By Jack Lyon | Published: December 17, 2003

If you work a lot with fonts, you’ll probably be interested in Microsoft’s Font Properties Extension, which will run under Windows 95 or higher (sorry, Mac users). The extension makes it possible to display information about a font’s origin, copyright, and licensing; its hinting and smoothing; whether or not the font can be embedded in […]

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Fixing All Caps in Text

By Jack Lyon | Published: December 3, 2003

The newsletter a couple of weeks ago featured a macro that would set all headings in a Word document in true title case, with articles and prepositions lowercased. But what if you have a document in which an author has typed other stuff in all caps–author names in footnotes, or book titles in body text? […]

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Page Down in Synch

By Jack Lyon | Published: November 19, 2003

Working on an index this week, I needed to ensure that pagination of the document I was indexing matched another document in which pagination had already been set. Because of the complexity of the material, I had to do this manually and visually, paging down in document 1, switching to document 2, paging down again, […]

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